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Stories from SlateHow Font Names Became One-Word Sales Pitches for Typographyhttp://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/10/14/tobias_frere_jones_on_how_font_naming_conventions_have_changed_with_the.html
<p><em>Over the past 25 years,<a href="http://www.frerejones.com/about/"> Tobias Frere-Jones</a> has created some of the world’s most widely used<a href="http://www.fontbureau.com/people/tobiasfrerejones/"> typefaces</a>. He has taught at the Yale University School of Art since 1996, gives lectures around the world, and has work in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Here at</em>&nbsp;The Eye, <em>Frere-Jones shares a post from his <a href="http://www.frerejones.com">blog</a> about the history of typography names.</em></p>
<p>Years ago, I asked one of my mentors what he thought was the hardest part of designing a typeface. I was expecting “the cap S” or “the italic lowercase” or something like that. But he answered without hesitation: the name. Finding the name is the hardest part.</p>
<p>Type has a long and rich history, not just in its shapes but also its organization and presentation. Scholars have discussed the marriage of roman and italic, originally independent forms. Others have charted the idea of “bold,” the shift of weight that is a signal all by itself. But the idea of a typeface name has received less attention.</p>
<p>Today, we expect a name to be a unique designation, independent of context, emphasizing personality rather than structure. It wasn’t always this way, so I went digging to find the beginning of this concept. As with most of type history, the answer is complicated.</p>
<p>For centuries, punchcutters would develop their styles within a narrow group of genres. There would be only one style of roman or italic, even if that style had been refined and focused over a span of years. The name only needed to pin down the remaining variable, the size (see above).</p>
<p>Less common genres would get a single broad term: Blackletter, Greek, Hebrew, Music, and so on. In this specimen printed by Dirck Voskens’ widow, <em>Duyts </em>(Deutsch) literally means <em>German</em>, and Textura or Blackletter by extension.</p>
<p>If there were multiple versions of a roman or italic (or anything else), a number could differentiate them simply. Roman No. 2 would be distinct from Roman No. 1, but the genre would not be reinvented or major new ingredients introduced. There was no need for more detail; the customer just needed to know which one was a little heavier or lighter, wider or narrower, and so on. (Professor Indra Kupferschmid touches on this point in her <a href="http://kupferschrift.de/cms/2012/03/on-classifications/">post</a> about type classification.)</p>
<p>In Giambattista Bodoni’s epic <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/189178806X/?tag=slatmaga-20">Manuale Tipografico</a> </em>of 1818, more than 100 romans and italics are shown with the name of a city as a kind of nickname, though the real name was still a size and a number. Trieste is really Ascendonica (22 point) No. 9, Palermo is Sopracanoncino (28 point) No. 3, and so on.</p>
<p>Throughout the Industrial Revolution, a new market for advertising drove typefounders to expand their inventories. The established vocabulary soon proved inadequate—a predictable result, given novelty was such a conscious goal. Founders needed to coin new terms to signal the unique aspect of new designs. But customers would need to understand this new jargon, so it behooved the founders to establish and maintain some equivalence in new terms.</p>
<p>Some of these new genre names found longevity in a stable definition. Latin came to mean something with spiky triangular serifs. Italian or French became a kind of adverb, indicating an inverted distribution of weight. Some accords could never be reached, so Antique means “slab serif” in the United States or Britain but “sans serif” in France. In Germany, Antiqua would take on another meaning, of modern or old-style serif.</p>
<p>Conflicts aside, new terms like Egyptian, Grecian, Tuscan, Ionic, Latin, and Grotesque took root. Always striving for curiosity and surprise, founders broke out of genres as soon as they were established. Ever narrower terms appeared, with little endurance in the marketplace: Bretonnes, Athenian, Runic, Arabesque, etc. Some foundries had inventories too large for evocative names, particularly for their decorated designs. Where no modifier could be coined or accepted, founders simply assigned a number and called it done.</p>
<p>By the middle of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, names for the more common designs had settled into a reliable syntax of base words and modifiers, with numbers appended as necessary. The result often seemed more like an ingredient list than a recognizable name. Just as “scrambled eggs and bacon” isn’t really the name of a dish, but a tally of the items involved, Gothic Condensed No. 7 is a (hopefully unambiguous) report of attributes.</p>
<p>Lawrence Johnson’s 1857 specimen shows a decorated design under the name National. Being an adjective like all the other genre names, it’s not clear if this was meant as a unique name, or the start of yet another novelty genre.</p>
<p>Wood’s <em>Typographical Advertiser </em>shows two designs under proper names with no connection to typography: Albert Edward and Lord Mayor. If Johnson’s National was not meant as a modern name, these would be more likely candidates.</p>
<p>George Bruce’s 1869 specimen continues the trend, with Tendril and Victoria. The shift from adjectives to nouns seems to be an important moment: Adjectives suggest a larger group while a noun stands alone.</p>
<p>A concocted name, the next stage of evolution, appears in the same specimen with the design Graphotype.</p>
<p>These new approaches became increasingly popular, and some foundries seemed to use them as a badge of modernity. Still, the old constructs like Ornamented No. 16, Antique Shaded, and Gothic Condensed No. 2 persisted well into the 20<sup>th</sup> century. In fact, a few old-school names survive to this day, like Linotype’s Old Style No. 7.</p>
<p>To return to our analogy on the diner menu, the Monte Cristo or the Reuben do not list any ingredients. Similarly, Cheltenham and Futura offer no preview of the design. The name is now part of the design itself, rather than a retrospective description, or a part number. The name precedes the typeface like a herald, rather than trailing behind like a stenographer. At its best, a typeface’s name is a one-word sales pitch.</p>
<p>So the modern typeface name—evocative and abstract—was not a breakthrough by one individual, but a project that took countless hands and more than 200 years to realize.</p>
<p>And I quickly came to agree: The name is the hardest part.</p>Tue, 14 Oct 2014 15:59:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/10/14/tobias_frere_jones_on_how_font_naming_conventions_have_changed_with_the.htmlTobias Frere-Jones2014-10-14T15:59:00ZLifeHow Font Names Became One-Word Sales Pitches for Typography242141014001typographydesignTobias Frere-JonesThe EyeThe Eyehttp://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/10/14/tobias_frere_jones_on_how_font_naming_conventions_have_changed_with_the.htmlfalsefalsefalseCourtesy of Tobias Frere-JonesAssendonica (about 22 point) and Tertia (about 16 point) by Bartholomeus Voskens. Hamburg, circa 1660.Shouldn’t Letter-Shaped Educational Toys Be Designed to Look Like Actual Letters?http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/05/27/typographer_tobias_frere_jones_wishes_his_toddler_s_letter_shaped_educational.html
<p><em>Over the past 25 years, </em><a href="http://www.frerejones.com/about/"><em>Tobias Frere-Jones</em></a><em> has created some of the world’s most widely used <a href="http://www.fontbureau.com/people/tobiasfrerejones/">typefaces</a>. He has taught at the Yale University School of Art since 1996, gives lectures around the world, and has work in the permanent collections of the Victoria &amp; Albert Museum in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Here at the Eye, Frere-Jones shares a post from his new </em><a href="http://www.frerejones.com"><em>blog</em></a><em> about his frustration with the type design of letter-shaped children's toys.<br /> </em></p>
<p>Letters are scattered all over the living room floor. Not designs of my own, but toys for our son. Letters for sticking on refrigerator doors, fitting into puzzles, stamping in finger-paint, or floating in a bathtub. There’s even a bag of gummy letters in the kitchen.</p>
<p>They’re all made by different hands, and in varying materials. As far as I can tell, they don’t aspire to any explicit style, but only to present the alphabet with minimum distraction. But there’s more noise and confusion here than their makers may realize.</p>
<p>Most of these letters have rounded corners and terminals, which seems to be the prevalent style for toddlers. I think I understand the appeal: It’s fun and bouncy like a balloon, and you probably can’t poke yourself in the eye with it. Some letter sets got their intersections rounded as well, leaving them with a web-footed appearance, like this W:<br /> </p>
<p>Unfortunately, the rounding-off and curving-in can weaken critical features of letterforms. So it’s an especially unfortunate thing to put in front of a child trying to learn the alphabet and gain confidence in knowing its shapes. It’s like making someone wear earplugs while they try to learn an instrument.</p>
<p>We learn letterforms by their tendencies, like the importance of asymmetry in the capital B. As that left-to-right contrast is turned down for the sake of style (or ease of manufacture) the letter becomes less and less of a B and more of an abstract lump.</p>
<p>The shape of a K is all about diagonals and sharp intersections. Here, the manufacturer dispensed with the tight corners because the router apparently couldn’t handle it, and effectively skipped a letter of the alphabet.<br /> </p>
<p>As a type designer, I could hem and haw about the design of this next K. The top leg looks a bit too light. The lower leg seems to taper towards its end rather than its join. Degrees of curvature at the terminals seem inconsistent. As a father, I’m just grateful that this actually looks (and acts) like a letter of the alphabet rather than a Rorschach test.</p>Tue, 27 May 2014 13:00:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/05/27/typographer_tobias_frere_jones_wishes_his_toddler_s_letter_shaped_educational.htmlTobias Frere-Jones2014-05-27T13:00:00ZLifeShouldn’t Letter-Shaped Educational Toys Be Designed to Look Like Actual Letters?242140527001typography designdesignTobias Frere-JonesThe EyeThe Eyehttp://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/05/27/typographer_tobias_frere_jones_wishes_his_toddler_s_letter_shaped_educational.htmlfalsefalsefalseCourtesy of Tobias Frere-JonesA jumble of letter-shaped toys.A Typographer’s Design History of the Unappreciated Pennyhttp://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/04/23/typographer_tobias_frere_jones_design_history_of_the_lowly_penny.html
<p><em>Over the past 25 years, </em><a href="http://www.frerejones.com/about/"><em>Tobias Frere-Jones</em></a><em> has created some of the world’s most widely used <a href="http://www.fontbureau.com/people/tobiasfrerejones/">typefaces</a>. He has taught at the Yale University School of Art since 1996, gives lectures around the world, and has work in the permanent collections of the Victoria &amp; Albert Museum in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Here at the Eye, Frere-Jones is sharing a post from his new </em><a href="http://www.frerejones.com"><em>blog</em></a><em>, a typographer's history and appreciation of the design of the lowly penny.</em></p>
<p>Every few years, there are calls to retire the American penny (as cumbersome and too expensive to produce), and rebuttals calling to preserve it (for posterity and price stability). I don’t know how or when this debate will be settled. Personally, I would not miss the gobs of metal in my pockets, but I would miss the lettering. And the numbering.</p>
<p>They’re easy to miss when you’re scrambling for change at a shop counter. Or you might just leave them in a dish there if you can’t be bothered to cart them around. But the lowly penny, more clinically known as the “one-cent piece,” has a history of lettering all to itself.</p>
<p>Coins are normally a job for sculptors, and President Theodore Roosevelt chose Victor David Brenner to design a new penny to celebrate the centennial of Lincoln’s birth in 1909. The new coin broke from the tradition of allegorical figures and depicted a specific person for the first time. Such practice had been explicitly avoided since independence, because many felt it tasted too much like the monarchy they had left behind. It seemed that Lincoln’s 100<sup>th</sup> birthday was the right time to drop the prohibition, and now we find it hard to imagine American currency without presidents.</p>
<p>The design process was marred by tension between Brenner and U.S. Mint Engraver Charles Barber, who had designed earlier coins and likely felt he should have received this commission himself. While proofing the design, Barber and Mint Director Frank Leach shifted Lincoln’s portrait towards the center of the coin, where the detail could be best rendered in striking. Troubled by the blank space above Lincoln’s head, they decided to add “IN GOD WE TRUST” along the top edge. This motto had appeared on U.S. coins for years, so Brenner could not have been surprised at its inclusion, but I can’t imagine he was happy about the tampering.</p>
<p>The lettering records the dissonance between the artist and his client. The “1909” figures are calmly rendered, and suggest a tool driven through clay or plaster. With awkward shapes and erratic spacing, the motto looks more like a part number brusquely stamped in. The motto would not get fixed for 60 years, after 55 billion coins had been produced.</p>
<p>The reverse of Brenner’s design is a beautifully balanced mass of lettering framed by sheaves of wheat, epic and quaint in the same breath. It is the pocket-sized monument that coins are meant to be, speaking for the ages from the vantage of 1909. The craft afforded here also belies the fact that this is the country’s smallest denomination. Brenner’s wheat sheaf design would also be the last time that lettering featured so prominently in U.S. coinage. It remained for 50 years, until Frank Gasparro’s rendition of the Lincoln memorial replaced it in 1959, to mark the sesquicentennial of Lincoln’s birth.</p>
<p>It’s not clear who updated the dies from one year to the next, though it seems obvious enough that different hands and tastes were involved. And yes, I was nuts to collect enough pennies so I could track this. Some years feature clenched shapes and tight spacing, others return to Brenner’s airy dignity. In 1934, the figure 3 is rendered with a descending end stroke. This “oldstyle” form vanishes for the rest of the ’30s, and then reappears in 1943.</p>
<p>The Mint made pennies out of steel that year to save copper for military use. Unfortunately the steel pennies were widely mistaken for dimes. The metal also began to rust after a few months of use. And they wreaked havoc on many vending machines, which expected nonmagnetic coins. Copper returned in 1944, and the Mint would spend the next 20 years filtering the steel pennies out of circulation.</p>
<p>The figure 7 had a similarly haphazard treatment. It appeared in a different form every 10 years between 1917 and 1967, before settling down with a descending curve in 1974:</p>
<p>To accommodate the escalating price of copper, the Mint changed the penny’s composition in 1983, from 95 percent copper to almost entirely zinc, with a thin coat of copper to retain the traditional color. The change in material also reduced the coin’s weight by 20 percent, inadvertently dramatizing its dwindling value. At about the same time, the dies were made shallower to reduce wear, flattening the coin overall. The figures became lighter and more monotone, losing the modeled quality of sculpture. The trend towards flatter surfaces has gradually continued since then, and now a penny feels more like a laser print than the tiny sculpture it actually is.</p>
<p>Around 480 billion pennies have been minted since 1909, and every one of them is still “live” currency. By some estimates, 200 million Lincoln Wheat pennies are still in circulation, so it’s not uncommon to find one in your pocket—I collected about 30 over six months of everyday transactions. So if you haven’t already, check your pockets and handbags for some overlooked history.</p>Wed, 23 Apr 2014 13:00:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/04/23/typographer_tobias_frere_jones_design_history_of_the_lowly_penny.htmlTobias Frere-Jones2014-04-23T13:00:00ZLifeWhy Has the Lettering on the Penny Changed So Often?242140423001typographydesigncurrencyTobias Frere-JonesThe EyeThe Eyehttp://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/04/23/typographer_tobias_frere_jones_design_history_of_the_lowly_penny.htmlfalsefalsefalseCourtesy of Tobias Frere-JonesA new penny to celebrate the centennial of Lincoln’s birth was first minted in 1909.How I Discovered New York City’s Old Typography Districthttp://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/04/11/typographer_tobias_frere_jones_searches_for_a_lost_nyc_neighborhood.html
<p><em>Over the past 25 years, </em><a href="http://www.frerejones.com/about/"><em>Tobias Frere-Jones</em></a><em> has created some of the world’s most widely used <a href="http://www.fontbureau.com/people/tobiasfrerejones/">typefaces</a>. He has taught at the Yale University School of Art since 1996, gives lectures around the world, and has work in the permanent collections of the Victoria &amp; Albert Museum in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Here at the Eye, Frere-Jones is sharing a post from his new </em><a href="http://www.frerejones.com"><em>blog</em></a><em> about what happened when two of his favorite things—typography and New York City’s history—led him to a surprising discovery about a forgotten part of his hometown.</em></p>
<p>I love old type specimen books. Any foundry, any period, it doesn’t matter. They will have me hypnotized. But I don’t usually linger at the title pages. Who would, really? All the fun and exciting stuff comes after that: the impossibly small text faces, the spectacular display faces, all the sample uses variously dowdy and natty. So a long time went by before I noticed a trend in specimens from New York foundries, particularly through the 19<sup>th</sup> century:</p>
<p>These addresses are pretty close together. No—they’re <em>really</em> close. Wait, some of these are less than a block apart. OK, hang on, stop. I needed to figure this out.</p>
<p>I re-read Maurice Annenberg’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/188471806X/?tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Type Foundries of America and Their Catalogs</em></a>, tracked down business directories of the period, and spent too much time on Google Earth. But I was able to plot out the locations for every foundry that had been active in New York between 1828 (the earliest records I could find with addresses) to 1909 (see below). All of the buildings have been demolished, and in some cases the entire street has since been erased. But a startling picture still emerged: New York once had a neighborhood for typography.</p>
<p>But why were they concentrated here, and not scattered throughout the city like the warehouses, the breweries, the stables, and the rest? This wasn’t the old Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, all packed together at the end of the island. The city was two-and-a-half-miles long by the middle of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, with full development extending to 14<sup>th</sup> Street. Land would likely have been cheaper up north, and the business directories show other kinds of factories operating well uptown. But even as type foundries expanded or merged, they remained in this small area. What did they find so vital about this one neighborhood?</p>
<p>My guess is that they were following the newspapers. New York had dozens of newspapers back then, with most headquartered around Park Row, later nicknamed “Newspaper Row.” Crews composed and recomposed dozens of pages for every issue, with some papers publishing multiple editions throughout the day.</p>
<p>Hand-set type was cast in “type metal,” an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony. Lead’s low melting point made it easy to cast, while the other metals added hardness and stability. But despite all the precise chemistry, type would still wear out. And delicate Victorian letterforms at tiny sizes (six and seven point were common sizes for text) could not have resisted fatigue for very long. Each paper would have placed large and frequent orders to keep their composing rooms running and their issues printing. So the foundries would have been staying close to their best customers.</p>
<p>The newspapers were, in turn, huddled around their most frequent subject and adversary, City Hall. And for its part, City Hall had been built at the start of the century on “The Commons,” an open area then at the northern edge of the city. But that frontier was moving outwards so rapidly that City Hall was well inside the developed city when construction finished after nine years.</p>
<p>So it seems that New York’s “Type Ward” was placed here by the blind arithmetic of history. If the local government had sought its permanent home 10 or 30 or 50 years later, City Hall would be somewhere else, with the newspapers and type foundries following.</p>
<p>Roughly half of New York’s foundries joined the American Type Founders conglomerate when it formed in 1892, and the remaining companies were bought out by 1909. ATF soon consolidated all of its operations in Jersey City, and the old Type Ward vanished. At the center of the upheaval was a young and rapidly growing foundry, across the river in Brooklyn.</p>Fri, 11 Apr 2014 15:29:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/04/11/typographer_tobias_frere_jones_searches_for_a_lost_nyc_neighborhood.htmlTobias Frere-Jones2014-04-11T15:29:00ZLifeNew York City Used to Have a Typography District?242140411001typographynew york citydesignTobias Frere-JonesThe EyeThe Eyehttp://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/04/11/typographer_tobias_frere_jones_searches_for_a_lost_nyc_neighborhood.htmlfalsefalsefalseCourtesy of Tobias Frere-JonesA. D. Farmer &amp; Son Type Foundry, circa 1897 illustration from <em>Book of Specimens</em> by A. D. Farmer &amp; Son Type Founding Co. (published 1900).